[resolved] Potential WordPress.org Improvement Projects (76 posts)

By now most people have heard the buzz about the WordPress development team "taking a release off" to work on the wordpress.org site, plugins, etc. A couple of things. 1. It's two months, not a full-length development cycle. 2. If any security issues or major bugs come up in this time, a point release would still be produced as usual. The "release cycle off" just means we're not going to start on new feature development and enhancements for version 3.1 until AFTER this two-month community project sprint.

We'll be working out the process for projects to be divvied up for mini-dev teams of contributors this week, but in the meantime, we want to hear about the improvements you think would have the biggest impact. We're considering everything from tiny text changes to major overhaul projects. That said, small, definable mini-projects that make measurable improvements to the community experience are going to be the easiest to work on.

Here's a list of things (in no particular order) we've talked about doing for the past six months. Tell us if any of these sound like they should be a top priority, or tell us if we missed the best idea ever (and then tell us what it is!). If you're interested in volunteering on one of them, note that in your response too.

Combine forum profile module with the new profiles, so we can use new profiles to follow thread activity etc.

Make profiles carry over to wordcamp.org

Create point system for reputation based on contributions/involvement (will need a way to set manually for things that don't have automated feeds we can use to measure) that can be used to give more weight to activity on site from trusted/high-authority community members (like forum responses, plugin reviews, etc)

Automated system to run reports each month on .org activity among users, so we can recognize people who are putting in a lot of energy aside from just patches

Mentorship:

Reports on when new user signs up, makes first action on various sections (forum post, trac comment or patch, suggestion, etc) so can send automated email with links to get more involved/provide feedback (or 'welcome wagon' can contact by email)

Use profiles to identify potential mentors/mentees by self-classification of skills and interests

Create 2-month mentorship template for suggested scope of help and contacts

Web site content:

Re-organize site IA (move themes/plugins to top level, etc.)

About/team page - make an actual page/section rather than just a sidebar list to put a more human face on the leads/contributors team

Change name of dev blog to news or announcements or something, since that's what it's used for and wpdevel is more of a dev blog now.

Ideas - Use the new suggestions theme (GSoC porject being worked on by Justin Shreve) and put it at make.wordpress.org/suggestions, have sections for core, plugins, themes, etc.

Documentation:

Handbooks! Start with series of 4: User, Plugin Dev, Theme Dev, Core Contributor. Could see more specific ones coming later.

Transition Codex to get rid of the lessony stuff and outdated screen info, make it the repository of all straight reference materials, such as lists of all functions, hooks, template tags, etc. as well as housing the handbooks.

Do it all in WordPress rather than wiki format.

Allow users to suggest changes via comments, assign volunteer editors to specific sections to stay on top of things.

Make handbooks accessible as pages/chapters, single HTML files, or print as PDF (entire handbook or specific chapter).

Use SVN or media library to manage the screenshots more easily.

Use wordpress.org login.

Process for handbook creation: identify 2 tech editors for each, create general outline of what's needed, find community volunteers to write up sections, have tech editors review for accuracy, have style editor revise for consistent tone/voice.

Training - To go with the handbooks, a series of training materials for each of the 4 audiences.

As I plugin developer. The first part looks very impressive. Features like plugin recommendation, reviews, categorization will be simply awesome and I am sure you will keep simple UI even if u r changing it.
Best wishes for new changes.

When it comes to plugins, it would be nice to have a filter in the search feature that allows us to filter out plugins that are not current. In other words, I want to see only plugins that have been tested up to 3.0 (or whatever current version is available) For ideas on how this may work, look at the add-ons to Firefox where you can filter by version there.

Same for Themes. Should be able to filter for themes that have been updated to include new 3.0 features.

As for the Codex, this definitely needs to be updated. Possibly consider a legacy version for those still using older versions, but certainly update the details and images to reflect 3.0's capabilities. Also, please document features better. There are a number of features that developers use that you can't seem to find in the Codex, but have to reply on various attempts by other users, which in many cases can bloat code or open security holes.

One final idea, this actually applies to the new menu system in 3.0 (which I love, by the way!). When you are creating a detailed menu and end up with a lot of pages in the menu, the menu system becomes cumbersome. It would be nice if the subpages could collapse (tree style) so that when I add another page, it is easier to place where I want it to be. Since it is javascript heavy, it can get a little buggy and slow when you have larger menus. It is especially evident in Internet Explorer, which I do not use, but the majority of web users still do.

Thats it for me. I love WordPress, and love the direction things are going. WP should be the CMS of choice very soon, even if people still want to call it a blogging software package! LOL

What about showing a slight difference between Automattic branded plugin and the rest of the community plug-ins.

I love you automattic guys & gals, but I think their should be a little difference between core automattic plugins and the rest. I also think they (automattic plugins) should be review by independent reviewers not associated with automattic.

Idea for wordpress.org: an easier way for localizers to contribute po+mo files for plugins against a plugin's repository, without having them all checked in via the developer. Perhaps even a method to submit translations against a plugin, with the plugin developer accepting them into the repo, would be a good first step?

Localizing plugins, both on the localizer side, and on the plugin author side, have a lot of unfortunate barriers which I believe could be improved via the repository.

@Kelton: Plugins by Automattic are not "core plugins." Core plugins is a concept for having some plugins that are supported by the core WordPress team, and has been discussed in various channels before, including this forum. Core plugins have nothing to do with Automattic, aside from the fact that in some cases Automattic employees might be part of the community teams or they might donate code.

It would be weird to mark Automattic's regular plugins differently than anyone else's, since there are other reputable businesses that put out plugins, and why wouldn't those be similarly marked? The only special case is Akismet, since it's bundled, but even that has been talked about -- the idea would be that Akismet would be unbundled and there would be a core anti-spam plugin that could use Akismet or any of the other popular anti-spam services.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to choose themes that is a little more user-friendly and emotional? I appreciate being able to choose 2-column, white, etc. but I think there’s a large % of the population that doesn’t care and/or gets intimidated by so many choices. I would extend the Theme categories “Subject” tag a little further or perhaps even dedicate another page to help people choose themes “If you’re a…..[photographer / food blogger / group blog / political blog / editorial / verbose / minimalist / video lover etc.] you might like a [ type of theme ]” and show a few sample themes, then encourage them to browse the rest, etc.?

I think a little more hand-holding re: themes would be good to tip into the masses.

IMHO... The forums here are a high-visibility area, it would be good if some focus can be put onto them in terms of the priorities. Improving their accessibility would go a long way to improving the image of WordPress.org as a whole, I think. (And a bbpress update would help us mods, too... ;)

bbpress update would help everyone, not just the mods. I for one am hoping it is fairly high up on the list. These forums are after all a major part of WordPress.org and the main place people go to for support.

I like the plugin authors having mod rights to their 'forum' or section of forum, be interesting to see how that pans out.

I just hope there is enough people to do everything on that list, because it certainly isn't short!

The contribution point / reputation system would definitely add stickiness to the forum. This in itself is probably why stuff like StackOverflow are so popular (see thread lately in wp-hackers). Definitely what the forums lack most IMO.

I think anything that can encourage contribution, whatever its form, is good, even something that's as flimsy as reputation points. Then make cool widgets/badges to show on sites etc.

If you are going to do the reputation, then you need to add full rep from going back a few more years. As well as combining profiles. I did a lot as darkdragon (can't see it though), less so as santosj, and by the time I was working with jacobsantos as my nick, I was slowly getting out of WordPress dev.

It would be nice if I could combine darkdragon, santosj into jacobsantos and have the full contributions listed for the rep. I don't think it is fair, that I'm at a disadvantage or some fields don't show up that should, because the full trac feed does not show up.

I already can't use the profiles on a resume for a job, I would be even more upset if some guy says, "Well your rep says you don't know what you are talking about." When I'm the guy who did most of the work on that subject. I think it is also prejudice that I'm supposed to help on the forums, IRC, etc to be a more productive in WordPress. For the most part, I have to spend most of my time to get my patches into core and don't have the time to help people.

vanillalounge, Nao: Mozilla has a case study on how they did their language support. I think it might be reasonable to look at that first. They put a lot of work into research and finding the best solution to the problem.

I'm sorry that 90% of list wont be done this year but that's how is going in WP.

@Mitcho, @nacin: First thing I wanted to post is about this issue. There are some progress on it already, but it is not finished. Because of that I wanted to suggest that one of priorities be to help Nikolay finish this so that developers, translators and users could finally have easy way for i18n, l10n and use of plugins/themes on local language. respectively.

Another thing is that we finally have new version of bbPress, since almost everything for it is finished. After that, forums here could be updated to that version to have benefit of email subscriptions. It is much, much easier than forking bbPress in a plugin or making plugins for wishes for forum mentioned in Jane's post. Very little work is needed.

Plugin Directory/Infrastructure

some basic strict rules for development should be made (eg. enqueue instead of hardcoding of JS and CSS, how directory & URL paths are made, nonces & add_setting etc) and that plugins that doesn't fix issue after warning be updated by someone else

making infrastructure that should be able to post localized data about plugin/theme via API, which could be used in next version of WP for plugin/theme browser/installer; to be built with in conjuction with l10n process which is mentioned above

Allow two different versions of a plugin to be tagged: testing and stable. Except for the handful of very popular plugins, most plugins will have difficulty getting visibility for their test version without making it the version that people see in their auto-update list. It would be good to encourage public testing of plugins before they're unleashed on the world.

Stats tracking for individual plugins. I'd like to see how people are finding my plugins, etc. Google Analytics support would be nice.

nth'ing the i18n requests. I maintain my own GlotPress install, but having it hosted WordPress.org instead would be so much better for maintenance and visibility.